The Samsung Instinct will be available in June for a yet undetermined price,
Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless, a cellphone industry trade show in Las
Vegas. Executives hinted that the price would be substantially lower than the
$399 for the cheapest iPhone.

Sprint, which has been losing subscribers, will spend $150 million to advertise
the Instinct when it launches, compared with $30 million for a typical product
introduction, according to David Owens, the companys director of devices.

Like the iPhone, the Instinct lacks a keypad and has just a few buttons. Most of
the functions are accessed by touching the screen.

A few touchscreen phones appeared on the U.S. market last holiday season, after
the iPhones debut in June.

Verizon Wireless launched the LG Voyager, which has an exterior touch screen and
folds out to reveal a nontouch screen paired with a keyboard. Sprint introduced
the Touch by HTC, a slim pad with only a touch screen.

Both phones were hampered by the lack of software designed specifically for a
touch screen. The Voyager dealt with that by adding a keyboard. The Touch
grafted some touchfriendly features on to Microsoft Corp.s Windows Mobile
operating system, which is designed for smart phones that either lack a touch
screen or are intended for use with a stylus. Some functions on the Touch are
hard or impossible to use by tapping with the fingers alone.

The Instinct is based on a Samsung phone thats already available under
different names, and with different software, in South Korea and Europe. Sprint
commissioned its own software from European design house Icon Mobile.

We took a more active part than we ever have in a phones development, Owens
said. This was designed from the ground up to be a touchscreen phone.

The software is based on Java, a commonly used programming language that should
make it easy to develop applications for the phone.

The Instinct will have a few features the iPhone lacks. For one, it will be the
first consumer phone in the U.S. to use EVDO Rev. A, the fastest cellular
broadband technology available on the Sprint and Verizon Wireless networks.

AT&T Inc. has phones that use a competing technology with equivalent speeds, but
the iPhone is not one of them: It runs on a comparatively slow network,
supplemented by WiFi access.

The Instinct also contains a Global Positioning System chip, for location
applications. The iPhone lacks one, but it can use cellular and WiFi signals to
determine an approximate position.

The Instinct wont be able to take input from more than one finger at a time:
The iPhones characteristic pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in feature wont
work. Sprint compensates for this by using the phones motion sensor. In a
demonstration of a prototype, tilting the phone while holding a button made a
Web page scroll.